SUPERSTAR JASON AARON BRINGS A CARTOON CLASSIC WITH A DEEP COMICS LINEAGE TO THE FOUR-COLOR PAGE!

Jason, you’ve tackled so many top titles in your career, across the biggest superheroes and many of your own creations. Where do you feel Thundarr the Barbarian fits into your deep bibliography, in terms of the skills and experience you’re pulling from or any inspirations that will flow into this project?

The Thundarr cartoon was the perfect distillation of everything I was excited about as a kid: post-apocalyptic settings, sword and sorcery adventures, and comic book heroes. It was one of the benchmarks for me in terms of falling in love with stories and storytelling, so in some sense you could say I’ve been building toward working on these characters since I was eight years old.

What is your history of experience with Thundarr the Barbarian? The show originally ran and then had some reruns in the early 1980s, around when you were a kid — though of course as time went on classics like these also became available through home media and streaming avenues. Did you dive back into the original material in preparing your stories for the new comics?

Yeah, I was a religious viewer of the show on Saturday mornings when I was a kid, sprawled out on the floor with my bowl of cereal. Unless it’s college football season, I still like to start my Saturdays with a bowl of cereal and a few cartoons, and Thundarr has always been in that mix. So I’ve been diving back into that material for years now. And fans of the show will notice tons of direct references to various episodes sprinkled throughout the comic.

Artist Kewber Baal is joining you on this project to bring your scripts to the page. He’s already whipped up several pages at the time we’re writing this, and they’re looking snazzy. What does he bring to the table stylistically, and how is it seeing your story come to fruition visually through his work?

Kewber is really going all out on the lush details of the wild setting, which is one of the most important and inventive elements of Thundarr’s story. He’s doing a killer job capturing the details of the show, while pushing the action and emotional weight to a much darker and more intense place. Thundarr fans are gonna be really excited by Kewber’s work on this.

Thundarr has a fascinating pedigree tied to comics. Many of the Hanna-Barbera classics of the 1960s had ties to names like Alex Toth, and those connections were there for the Ruby-Spears cartoons as well. Thundarr not only had some Toth ingredients, but the primary visual template for the show was established by Jack Kirby, alongside Steve Gerber handling much of the base story, and others like Mark Evanier, Martin Pasko, and Roy Thomas all chipping in over time. Is there some additional appeal in taking on this character and world due to that legacy? And is there also some pressure that comes from alongside those greats? (Though many fans would likely already regard you in that echelon.)

Yeah, Thundarr has a comic book pedigree that’s pretty much unmatched. But following in the footsteps of legends is part of the assignment when you’re working in comics. I look at working on Thundarr the same as tackling Thor or Conan or Superman. You have to understand and honor what made these characters so special and exciting in the first place, while still being willing to tell your own story and not just recycle the greatest hits of the past. I want this Thundarr series to feel massive and important to the character’s overall mythology and legacy, while also feeling like an extension of the show we all love. I actually found myself feeling a bit more precious with Thundarr than I did with even Thor or Superman. I don’t want this to feel like too radical of a departure from the show, even as we’re pushing the violence a bit beyond the restraints of Saturday morning cartoons, and digging deeper into the emotional core of these characters.

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